Are convolutional neural networks inspired by the human brain?
In the eye, the retinal ganglion cells have a receptive field that is equivalent to some types of convolution filters, most of them edge detectors.
The brain is a big unknown, nobody knows how it does to organize, memorize, create concepts, learns the language, ... . Thus, it is not possible to establish a parallelism.
In particular, brain has a capacity of handle independence in scale and rotation that CNN's are not able to reproduce.
As general remark about NN and brain: even when it is always said that &quot;neural network cells&quot; are &quot;inspired&quot; in biological neurons, there are critical differences that made this similitude only a &quot;inspiration&quot;. Thus, comparison of a CNN or any other kind of NN with brain is always a fuzzy comparison. The biggest difference is probably the learning capacity: the human brain learns by itself, while the neural network needs an external system (the back-propagation algorithm) that feeds the NN with the learned parameters.